


Come As You Are

by Muir_Wolf



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Bartenders, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-25
Updated: 2011-08-25
Packaged: 2017-10-23 01:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muir_Wolf/pseuds/Muir_Wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penny: Adventures in Bartending</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come As You Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jazzfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/gifts).



Penny takes up being a bartender the same way she’s taken up everything else in her life. She spends hours sprawled on the couch, reading the mixed drinks books she picked up on sale at the mall bookstore. _Hairy navel – one ounce vodka, one ounce peach schnapps, orange juice_. (The fourth one she makes, she starts giggling, and ends up repeating _schnapps_ to herself as she practice makes the fifth. Learning to bartend is _fun_.)

 _At work, she sometimes adds a little flare, a little unnecessary twirling of the bottles. So she likes to show off a little, shoot her – if this is what she’s going to be doing for an indeterminate amount of time, she’s going to be _good_ at it, _thankyouverymuch_._

Things she learns while bartending: People have it much worse off than she does, and even if they don’t they think they do. Guys like girls who bartend. Girls like girls who bartend. Flirting is fantastic for tips, but chances are at least once every week or two, someone’s going to try to kiss her.

Once, Penny’s hand slips when she’s pouring a drink, and she gets amaretto all down her shirt. When Bernadette, who’d finished her shift up a few hours earlier and has spent the time getting nicely liquored and complaining about Howard, leans over like she’s going to lick it off, Penny’s pretty sure that she’s had enough.

Sheldon, drunk Sheldon that is, once spent an entire night watching her. It was a little distracting at first, and maybe yeah she was a little guilty that she’d let Nick (the other bartender) slutty up Sheldon’s drink, and maybe she felt a little funny that Sheldon complimented the shape of her hands and the shade of her eyes, and maybe she should’ve been expecting him to lean in a little and murmur something physically sexy (and no, not body physically, we’re talking science physics-y), but hell. He doesn’t seem to remember it in the morning, and that’s good. It is.

Raj gets obnoxious when he’s drinking, they all know that (unless, of course, you’re being annoyingly accurate and remember just how un-obnoxious he’d been that one night). However, ever so entertainingly, he also gets handsy. With Howard. And drunk Howard? Not so much of the minding. Bernadette has an SD card full of pictures of them dancing and groping and groping while dancing, and she’d flushed an adorable shade of red when Penny’d asked her what she was going to do with them.

It takes a while for Penny to realize that maybe she’s started looking at bartending differently. That maybe it’s not just a stepping stone for something more, that maybe she’s not being good because she wants to be good but because she actually _likes_ it.

The customers can be annoying as hell sometimes, and it’s not like her friends are ever anything but obnoxious, but. So she likes hearing about people’s problems, all right? And maybe she gives good advice, and maybe she likes to size people up and guess their drink, and maybe she likes watching relationships blossom and one night stands start their adventure together, and yeah.

And maybe she should slutty Sheldon’s drink up more often.

 

  
_Finis_   



End file.
